That's part of the formula.

Not legally, you can't. In fact, MS has clarified the license so that an OEM license is only good for a single computer (that is, it isn't a transferable license) built for resale. Hobbyists aren't allowed to use it on hardware they build to keep for themselves. How much you care about Microsoft's terms is, of course, entirely up to you.

Profit motive.

Passing taxes on to investors is entirely appropriate. Liability shielding is a really sweet government-provided perk of incorporation -- no individual BP shareholder (who wasn't also a negligent corporate officer, and unfortunately probably not even those) will be personally liable for a dime of gulf spill damage, to name one example. The liability shield facilitates capital formation but it can also lead to short-sightedness, risky corporate behavior, and higher social costs. No reason the shield should come free of charge.

I am reminded of an incident a few years ago when the public water supply of Wuxi, China started smelling like sewage out of the tap. The newspapers had big front-page photos of the mayor and other city officials drinking tap water to try to convince people that it was safe.

I have more than $260 worth of shelving for my dead tree books, and I buy cheap shelves. There are infrastructure costs associated with any kind of book ownership.

The NSA's SELinux, anybody? Obama administration Drupal sites? Forge.mil?

These morons can ask all they like but I don't think they're going to get anywhere.

I was in China in December of 2006 when this happened. One major undersea cable was damaged and let me tell you, China was effectively cut off from the English-speaking Internet. I couldn't get google.com to load, or check my US-based email. The remaining network infrastructure between China and North America was simply inadequate to meet the demand. According to that wiki link, spam from China dropped 99% during the outage.

Severing trans-Pacific cables would do a lot more to cripple a Chinese cyberattack than you think.

Man the millitary types just crawl out of the woodwork when you post anything negative about them. The point was that they were actively scrimming and the Chinese sub managed to bypass their sensors.

Yeah, but the Party built in an escape clause. See Article 51:

"The exercise by citizens of the People's Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens."

source

The "interests of the state" clause is a license for the Party to do whatever the hell it likes, the rest of the articles be damned. The Chinese constitution is more useful as toilet paper than as a binding social contract.

You can configure unison to ignore files like OS X's ._blarg stuff (or anything else for that matter) while syncing.

I sync between 3 computers using a hub-and-spoke system. My file server is the hub; my desktop and laptop both sync only with the file server.

I like Unison for this sort of thing.

Electric trains are pretty cost-effective.

Every human having their own personal high-speed transport is a historically recent innovation and not a sustainable one. The age of the car has to end to solve this problem.

It would, in fact, be different.

Religious homophobes and religious abortion protesters are intersecting communities- right-wing religious extremists. There's a history of murder and terrorism in America's right-wing religious extremist fringe, and a history of hit lists being posted to the internet, ostensibly to shame but too often resulting in the listed people being targeted for violence.

When gay marriage activists publish a list, it really is just a shame list.